oh good! will grab a copy before it gets the ‘satanic verses treatment’ (although that’s unlikely given the recent popularity of manto in lit fest circles). Do you think these works are more radical in the original urdu?

I think that there has been historical drift in what we think of as “radical” … between the publication of Angaaray and the present, there has been a lot of radical art and all of it has changed what we now think counts as subversive or transgressive or shocking. So, it’s not (for me) a question of the original Urdu against the English translation … it’s really a question of how much our sensibilities have changed.